The Coldest Mile (4 page)

He was thinking what a fucked mess this was when Moe Irvine and three other men busted into the office, all kinds of heavy hardware flashing. Chase was trying to decide if he'd put himself into this stupid position because, somewhere deep inside, he wanted to suicide like his father.

That sorrow swept through him again, the storm much closer to the beach this time.

Lila said to him, Love, it's time to stop this foolishness.

The torpedo who'd walked into Chase's room with blood on his shirt now stepped in front of the
others and held his hand out, palm up, waiting for the pistol. When Chase didn't turn over the long-barrel fast enough, the guy actually snapped his fingers.

What a crew. They might ace him for a lot of things, but not this.

Chase gave the gun up.

Checking the scene, his bronze chin angled first in one direction and then another, Moe Irvine took his time before he spoke. “So … somebody explain. What's going on here?”

Another stupid question. Chase had been in jams before, but he had to admit this time he was a touch edgy. He'd always dealt with cops and professional thieves, guys who followed a code. But somehow these people, who used to be at the top of the crime chain, just didn't seem to have one, at least not anymore. He couldn't tell which way things would jump next.

The torpedo took another step. He stared down at the bruiser who'd finally quit screaming and was now mewling like a newborn. The torpedo's eyes shifted to Chase.

“Don't hurt him, Bishop,” Moe Irvine barked. “He's new.”

“Nobody's going to hurt him,” Bishop said.

“Why not?” Jackie asked, still hiding out in the corner, and Chase found himself echoing the question. Yeah, why not?

Stepping over to the collapsed thug, Bishop lightly toed the guy's damaged foot. The strongarm
started making rubber ducky noises—it was the kind of sound no man liked to hear another guy make, because it meant he might make it himself someday.

Bishop turned and gave Chase a warm, friendly smile. It even reached his eyes, which was a damn hard thing for a stone killer to learn how to do. But Bishop did it.

“You made short work of them,” he said.

“They're sloppy,” Chase told him. “And they really didn't want to hurt me without a good reason.”

“You've done some muscling.”

“No, that's not my area.”

“What is?”

“I'm not a strongarm,” Chase said, “I'm a wheelman.”

“Strongarm?” That got an amiable chuckle from Bishop. He almost sounded like a normal guy instead of somebody who could cut a nun's throat and wash the blood off his hands in a baptismal fount. A nice nun too, not one of the mean ones. “I haven't heard anybody use that term in a while.”

It was another holdover from running around with Jonah and his strings when Chase was a kid. A fourteen-year-old getaway man for a crew of middle- aged pros. He had a throwback mentality and sometimes used grift speak that only old men or guys born into the life would know.

Bishop was caressing the .357 in his hand. Un con sciously he plied it, like touching a woman's wrist at dinner while the wine was being served. His thumb circled over the casing, his forefinger easing back
and forth across the trigger guard. It made Chase sick to his stomach.

“What do you drive?” Bishop asked. “When you're not driving a limo?”

Everyone put their cannons away and stood around trying to follow Bishop's lead without knowing exactly where it was going. They looked to Moe Irvine, who didn't do anything either. They glanced at Jackie, who glanced back. They couldn't keep their eyes on him too long without pulling a face. That ascot.

Chase said, “You ever met a driver who didn't answer by saying ‘anything’ when you asked that question?”

“No.”

“There it is.”

Everybody listened in, wondering what Bishop might do next. Chase was pretty interested in that himself.

The fondling of the pistol was getting creepy now, Bishop unable to help himself, really working over the gunmetal. He kept his smile up the whole time.

In the back of Chase's mind Jonah said, You were stupid, you should've kept the gun, you should've shot him in the face.

Bishop asked, “What was the problem here?”

“Jackie got mad because I changed the plugs in his Ferrari,” Chase said.

With a gurgle of aggravation Jackie started to step around his desk and then thought better of it. He went to sit in the chair again and thought twice
about that too. Finally he decided to lean against the corner of the desk like a doctor in a commercial about to talk about erectile dysfunction.

There was the gurgle again, this time louder, with an edge of protest. Jackie said, “Listen—I have something I want you all to know—”

Everybody ignored him. Moe Irvine finally got a move on and said to Bishop, “All right, get Crowley to the emergency room. Give Elkins back his piece. We've got work to do.” He frowned at Chase. “Stay away from the goddamn Ferrari.”

“Sure.”

These others, Chase didn't have to worry about them. It was Bishop he needed to keep his eyes on.

They helped Crowley to stand and carried him groaning from the room. Bishop turned over the pistol with a quiet laugh. Elkins had some trouble putting his long- barrel back into its holster and the seam in his jacket's shoulder started to give with the loud and distinctive rending of cheap material.

They all filed out, even Jackie, leaving Chase alone in the room. He looked around, mulling over the score, trying to figure out why he was really here, and thinking, My grandfather could come in here with nothing but a nail file and kill every one of us.

I
n the dream, his dead parents sat at the kitchen table
with his dead wife, talking in hushed tones as if they didn't want him to hear. When they noticed he was in the room, they looked at one another with anxious expressions and passed their last whispers. After a moment, they turned their attention to him. They waited, unblinking, for Chase to say something.

His heart began to hammer as he stood there trying to get out the words, but nothing would come. Nothing ever did. In a fourth chair sat his unborn sibling, murdered before its own birth. Their mother had been shot in the kitchen, and that's where he always dreamed of her. The kid might be a boy or a girl, Chase still couldn't tell, no matter how many times he had nightmares like this.

He wanted to ask it, What are you?

A breeze blew in. He smelled floor wax and furniture polish. His father wiped down his glasses with some kind of citrus- scented cleaner. Lila never wore
perfume but she bathed with a vegetable bath oil. Cucumbers, avocados, aloe. His memories and dreams were getting tangled. Her hair twisted across her eyes. He expected her to brush her curls back, but she didn't. Just kept sitting there with her hair covering most of her face.

Sometimes the kid spoke in the nightmares and sometimes it didn't. Chase waited. So did the kid. So did the other dead. It had gone on like this for a while now and he wondered if it would ever end, or if he even wanted it to. Lila murmured something from beneath her hair that he didn't catch. He tried to move to her but couldn't get any closer.

The kid hopped out of the chair, crawled across the table to Chase, and said, Listen to me. Find the girl.

B
lunt, aching pain drove him up from sleep. It ini
tially centered in his fingers, which were purple and throbbing as he came awake, but a second later he hurt all over. His fight with the thugs had torn open the gunshot wounds again. His ribs sang. His collarbone raged. It was still infected. The fingers were fucked, he must've refractured them.

He carefully climbed off the bed and made it out into the hall bathroom he shared with the rest of the floor. Nobody else was around. Under the sink he found a good supply of bandages, hydrogen peroxide, tape, even catgut. The real stuff—it had probably been in the house for forty years. Chase changed his dressings and set the bad fingers in place. He checked for painkillers in the medicine chest. All they had was aspirin. Family probably made fifty mil a year from opiates, but they shared none of the good stuff with the hired help. He took the bottle and chugged five tablets.

He gathered the old bloody bandages and carried
them with him to his room, where he hid them at the bottom of his gym bag at the back of his closet. He'd dump them sometime in the afternoon. He didn't want to advertise that he was a couple steps slower than usual.

Chase stood in the window and stared out toward Jackie's golf course and caught the scent of water on the wind. His thoughts twisted. His dreams were growing more intense, the details clearer. Lila had grown up in the back hills of Mississippi and always had a wide superstitious streak. She'd once told him the dead would always make their will known, and it had stuck with him.

His own history was prominent in his mind. A tangle of emotions and half- understood compulsions and motivations. The Deuce had been right, Chase shouldn't be here, but what else was he going to do? Go back to stealing cars? He had a chance to lay in a big score here, and he'd need the money for the girl—for Kylie. He stared in the direction of the water.

He tried not to think about what had led him here but something had broken inside of him and he could feel the memories surging forward, wanting out.

Lila had loved the ocean and Chase had eventually grown to enjoy it too. He'd once thought he'd never be able to sit on a beach again because his old man had snuffed himself by taking a sailboat out into the Great South Bay one winter.

His father had suicided because he couldn't handle the grief after Chase's mother had been found shot dead in their kitchen. Fifteen years gone now and no one knew who'd done it, but Chase was finally starting to get a few ideas.

Jonah, his grandfather, a man he'd not only never met before but had never even heard about, plucked him from foster care and convinced him that family was all that mattered, that blood was important. Maybe it was true.

Jonah—carved from rock and just as feeling. Chase started working professional strings and crews immediately. First short cons and small grifts, and then acting as a second- story burglar and a wheelman. He'd been brought in on bigger scores because he was a first- rate driver and kept his nerve. It had gone on like that for years, until the day he'd watched Jonah ice one of his own men.

He severed ties with his grandfather and tooled around the South. That was how he met Lila—a deputy sheriff in a Mississippi county—during a score gone bad. He went straight, they got married, and eventually came back to New York where she joined the Suffolk County cops and he taught high school auto shop.

Chase pressed his forehead to the cold glass, hoping it would cool his heated thoughts, but it wasn't nearly enough. Lila in his head telling him, It's all right, love, I'll help you through this.

Six weeks ago she'd been murdered on duty while trying to stop a crew heisting a diamond merchant's
store. The driver, Earl Raymond, parked in the street and waiting to roll, had shot her three times with his left arm hanging out the window

Chase hadn't seen Jonah for ten years, but his grandfather was the only man hard enough to help him go after the string. The old man showed up with Angie, a woman forty years his junior, who was the mother of his two-year-old daughter, Kylie.

It was a weird setup and Chase had a hard time picturing what the little girl's life must be like, but he knew that Jonah would ruin it for her. Angie knew it too and asked Chase to take a run at his grandfather, pop him twice in the back of the skull.

Chase had a lot of resentment, but he couldn't do that.

He tracked the crew to a motel in Newark, and at the last minute Angie put two in the old man's back. It didn't slow Jonah or stop him. He killed her while Chase had an old- fashioned shootout with Earl in the middle of the parking lot. Earl driving his sweet Plymouth Superbird with the funky extended front end, the 440 V8 tuned up right, while Chase just stood there already shot a couple of times, his ribs cracked, fingers busted, and tried to lift his gun to hit a moving target. Though Chase wasted five shots without even cracking the windshield before he finally put one in Earl's head.

Jonah in his mind saying, You should've taken him out with the first blast.

He was right.

Now Chase thought of Jonah out there, maybe
with his baby girl and maybe not. Angie had left the kid in Sarasota with her sister Milly Chase didn't know anything else except that she was married to a professional surfer. He figured there couldn't be that many professional surfers in Sarasota with wives named Milly.

He could find the kid one way or another. With the money he hoped to score from the Langans, he figured he had a better choice he could offer the child. Some way to protect her from Jonah, from the kind of life that Chase himself had been drawn into.

There was nothing else for him to do. Jonah had been right about one thing. Blood was important.

Lila said, Save the baby.

S
tanding at the window, Chase watched the doctor
pull up and park at an angle at the side door again, the guy taking a last couple puffs of a cigarette then carefully putting it out against his heel. How would that make a cancer patient feel, seeing his own doc hacking up yellow phlegm and smelling like a second- floor boys’ room.

After all this time, Chase still had a lot of questions. He wanted to know why his father had said that he'd asked to make an appeal to the killer, when the truth was the cops had backed him into doing it. He wanted to know why his mother had cried so much the night before she died.

Talking about Jonah, Angie had said,
Everyone else he destroys. More than you know.

And Jonah had said someone else had tried to kill him over a kid.

Another foolish woman.

Chase couldn't shake those words. They hummed and buzzed and bit at him.